Revue
It all started because I missed content from Twitter accounts I followed. I figured there should be a product that lets you subscribe to and receive push notifications of curated content—Twitter itself felt too cluttered, with disorganized information and no real reminders. I then thought about using newsletters as the delivery method. At the time, most newsletter platforms were either expensive or required you to create and update your own original content. Revue’s solution was different: you didn’t need to be a creator—you just had to follow others, and the platform would seamlessly aggregate and publish their updates for you. (Today, Revue is connected to most major international social media platforms, so you can drag and drop updates directly from people you follow, or use RSS feeds—since everything can be converted to RSS, the content creation cost is very low.)
It took a year to reach 15,000 users. The first few hundred came from promoting the product on Product Hunt. Growth then accelerated to over 4,000 users, which is when Revue secured funding and onboarded a technical co-founder. Six months later, they hit 15,000 users, with a team of just five people.
Its standout feature is aggregating almost all major international social content platforms alongside RSS and WordPress, allowing users to directly import and drag-and-drop resources. These are then semi-automatically organized into newsletters and delivered as pushes. Compared to other email marketing tools abroad—which are all paid products—Revue is nearly completely free, which is impressive.
Unfortunately, it seems Revue is no longer available in China.